Demon's Virtue

"You three, take care of things here. Make sure that nothing even dares touch the children." Eiro said as he started running forward. He didn't want the Rust Eater get away, since it was a rather precious specimen. With the metallic thread that it could produce, he would be able to easily bind all the spiders up.

Metallic thread was an amazing material for protective clothing as well, which Eiro maybe should order sometime. The stuff that Armodeus made for Eiro and the children only included things meant specifically for combat, but not for times outside of that. And since you always needed to be careful, Eiro thought that it would be a good idea to have clothes made using metallic thread.

And to top it off, metallic thread was rather precious, and a material that was often requested at different guilds. Eiro couldn't let this chance slip up.

Eiro climbed up the tree where he was able to sense the spider currently being. He even saw the spider and reached for it, but before Eiro knew it, the spider just jumped away and climbed onto another tree.

It was a bit annoying, but Eiro figured that it wasn't that big a deal. He just followed the spider by jumping after it. And from then on, the attempt to capture the spider really just declined into a simple cat and mouse chase.

The Rust Eater was incredibly quick, and due to its small size it was able to climb into places that Eiro couldn't access that easily. He was rather annoyed by its behavior, but this already showed one more reason why it would be worth it to get his hands on this spider and somehow tame it.

A Rust Eater's intelligence was superior to that of their brethren, and if they happened to evolve in certain directions, it was even possible for them to use magic.

Eiro was rather excited to see where he could possibly go with this Rust Eater. Either way, for now, Eiro had to even catch it. The Demon ran, jumped, crawled, and so on, but was always annoyed by other spiders or by the fact that the Rust Eater went places that Eiro himself couldn't go.

But in the end, he managed to somewhat figure out its pattern, and even slightly controlled the way it moved around by chasing it in particular ways. At least that's what Eiro figured, but at some point, the spider did something he didn't expect. It started digging a hole in the ground.

Of course Eiro immediately tried to reach into it to get the spider out, but instead, the spider just reached the caves underneath. And with that, Eiro had it. He wouldn't let that little piece of shit run away from him anymore.

"Nelli, Gondos, tell Jess, James and Krog that I'll go into the nest and take care of the spider queen and a few of the regular spiders. There's still enough out here to get them to level up a few more times, but have them wait for me first. And after you told them, come here, both of you." Eiro told them with an annoyed groan, trying his best to keep his attention on the Rust Eater down there to make sure it couldn't hide somewhere.

A few moments later, the two spirits appeared next to him. Eiro extended his hand toward Gondos, who quickly chose to dive into Eiro's arm, and only his arm. This was something they figured out after a little bit of practice as well. It was of course not as efficient as going for the 'full dive', but it still extremely enhanced the strength of Eiro's magic.

And so, the Demon was able to push his hand into the small hole in front of him again before immediately opening it up enough to let him into the caves before Gondos split up from his arm again. It was still pretty mana intensive, so they couldn't do this all the time either.

"Why aren't you just using fire magic?" Nelli asked as Eiro jumped down into the caves, and the Demon looked at her with a light frown, "I don't want to kill the Rust Eater." Eiro pointed out, and then continued through the tunnel system. For now, Eiro just continued through the tunnels, killing spider over spider using Nelli's water to freeze them to death while he worked together with Gondos to make it easier for him to traverse these tunnels.

Soon, however, Eiro actually managed to catch the small rust eater. It was a bit annoying, and had razor-sharp hairs on its body, but after Eiro just held it using some cloth that didn't matter anymore either.

For now, he just had to make his way outside through the masses of frozen, dead spiders that Eiro barely got any experience from, he remembered something.

Experience-sharing was a thing... when someone damaged something even a little, they would get a bit of experience if that damage helped in killing that enemy, "I can see another reason why Life Force is kept as such a secret now." The Demon said with a broad grin, although he felt slightly idiotic about the fact that he didn't come up with that idea beforehand. It was a rather good one, really.

Eiro ran out of the cave system and met back up with Jess, James and Krog, as well as Lugo and the children. Eiro made sure that Leon included the metal spider in the 'love aura', to stop it from being aggressive, and then tied it up a little more as well.

It was constantly pushing out metal thread out of fear right now, which Eiro immediately used to tie the Rust Eater's own body up itself. He would need a little more of it to do the same for the other spiders.

But that wasn't the most important thing right now.

"You three, do you want to reach the point where you can change your class once we're back in town?" Eiro asked, and the three of them looked at each other before turning back to Eiro, "Yeah, of course we do. Why wouldn't we?" James asked with a frown, and the Demon then slowly turned toward the tubs of ice that Eiro made to keep the spider-blood in before.

"Then I would need a little something from you guys. A mug full of blood from each of you, infused with as much life force as possible." Eiro announced to them, and the three looked at the Demon as if he was crazy.

"What the- Why would we do that?!" Krog asked rather annoyedly, and Eiro sighed lightly, "Then let's start with a small droplet. Krog, bite into your finger and give me a droplet of blood infused with as much life force as you can." The Demon said, and with a light frown, the Heavy Warrior did as suggested.

Once Eiro was sure that he really pushed life force into it, Eiro used water magic to pick the blood up together with the life force inside of it of course.

And then, he proceeded to turn it into a thin needle that he used to prick his own arm.

[-1 Health]

Instantly, a blue notification appeared in front of Krog, saying that he did one damage to Eiro, and the warrior seemed rather confused.

"But how the fu-" Krog said, and quickly stopped himself from swearing after seeing Eiro's expression.

"It's simple. 'Health' is 'Life Force'. As far as I can tell, the biggest reason why we can damage other people's health is because we have life force as well. Life Force is what makes you a living being. So, anything that has your life force in it is an extension of yourself. And as such-"

"It is seen as an attack that we worked on as well as long as our life force is involved..?" Jess asked quietly, and with a broad grin, Eiro nodded his head.

"That's exactly it. And that way, we can cheat a little bit. I'm going to help you extract a little more of your life force for this to really maximize the damage you guys do. And then, since the three of you aren't that far away from level 100 anyway, this might be able to push you at the very least within two or three levels of that point."

"Is... Is that so..?" Jess muttered quietly, and then sighed a bit in response, "It kind of feels like cheating..."

"It does, but who cares? Not like you're doing anything bad." Eiro pointed out, and offered his dagger to Krog first of all while making a jug out of ice that he could store the blood in.

"Come on, big guy. Let's try this." Eiro suggested, and Krog slowly nodded his head. He cut into his wrist to make as much blood flow as possible, and Eiro immediately proceeded to try and assist Krog with manipulating his life force to push it into the blood that was pouring into the jug.

The moment that he got enough blood, he and Nelli properly healed Krog's wrist up. Then, they did the same with James and Jess, until Eiro had three large jugs of life-force infused blood in his hands.

"Alright, then come on. There's an entrance into the nest not too far from here." Eiro pointed out and swiftly went ahead as he started carefully mixing the blood together with some water that he had Nelli currently refine just for this.

He made sure not to damage the Life Force in any way, which was a little tough, but Eiro managed to do it in the end.

Once they stood in front of the cave entrance, which luckily was rather central in this area, as they came close to the main part of the nest already, Eiro had Gondos open the entrance up a little more and then immediately proceeded to push the blood-water mixture toward the entrance to the cave system. But of course that wasn't it. Instead, Eiro made use of a spell that Jess had only recently reminded him of.

He turned the mixture of blood and water into thin mist that was able to spread throughout the whole cave system. Of course, Eiro tried to spread it out as much as he could, but it still didn't reach every place. At the very least, the smell of the blood made spiders actually gather inside of that mist.

Either way, since this was now the case, all that Eiro needed to do was to use that mist made of blood and water to completely freeze those hundreds of spiders inside of the cave's tunnels.

And luckily, this happened surprisingly quickly. After freezing the first couple to death, Eiro raised the temperature instead to damage them with heat, before immediately freezing them again. Then he raised the temperature, and then dropped it again. Over and over again, Eiro repeated this process, while Jess, James and Krog behind him were just looking at the glory of these numerous damage notifications appearing faster than they could tell.

And of course, the same was the case with their level-up notifications. Soon, Eiro stopped everything going on inside the large cave system, when he stopped damaging anything, and instead looked at the one notification that mattered to him right now.

[You have leveled up!]

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